Page 33 of I Never Said I Love You

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One of theglories of summer in Michigan is the long days, sixteen hours of daylight at the peak of the season. If the sun doesn’t crest as early as it does over Cadillac Mountain, it rises early enough, and gradually as we got to know one another again, Nao Kao and I learned the rhythm of one another’s routines, or our routines as they existed, at least for me, in the middle of a raging pandemic.

I would go for an early morning run greeting the sun as night became day, or, even more gloriously, a swim, and then I would chat with Nao Kao for an hour or so. A similar window occurred in the evening, and I would sit in my breakfast nook, watching the rabbits and deer in the waning light, occasionally snapping a picture for him of the nature he so missed in the urban heart of Vientiane.

At first, our conversations were discrete, with a clear beginning and a firm end. At some point they began to wend through the week in a single thread, touching on everything from our time together to the classes we were teaching toSeinfeldmemes and what it meant to be a good parent. Parenthood, or more accurately in my case, the lack of it, was the one regret I could not pin on Jake. He had been ambivalent but willing to have a family whenever the topic arose. But parenthood was incompatible with a lifestyle in which the next airplane was never more than five days away. Whether the lifestyle itself was a reaction to Jake might have been a closer question, but nothing would see me consider the change in lifestyle that parenting would require.

When I grew too nostalgic even for him, this man who feasted on Segal and Wilde, and cited Dickens’s Oliver as his favorite character in literature for his innocence and bravery, Nao Kao would remind me of the horrors of parenthood even in a place where children still respected their elders.

His twins were grown, students, both of them, at the National University of Laos, a fact about which he was unquestionably proud. His youngest daughter, born a year after he had returned home, American diploma in hand, was completing her last year of high school, and determined to strike her own path.

“She wants to go abroad,” he explained.

“Seems fair. You did. Twice,” I reminded him.

“Yes,” I could sense the hesitation.

“What does your wife think?” From the family photos he posted semi-regularly, I was positive –positive– that Nao Kao was still married, yet he consistently refused to acknowledge as much, refused to even acknowledge that I was asking the question.A nice girl. Normal.How I wished I knew anything of her beyond those two bland adjectives. When an opening presented itself, I tried.

“This one is different. Her sisters are happy here, but the youngest one, she is restless. You know what that’s like.”

It was not an accusation, I was certain, though it gave me a pang that one of my defining traits was something Nao Kao clearly wished was different about his own daughter’s character. I felt a pang for the girl, too. A restless nature made for an interesting life, but not always an easy one. Nor was it lost on me that he had expertly dodged the question I’d actually asked.

“Her future is not here.”

“I see. So, any plans for the weekend?”

Big feelings frightened me. If he hadn’t understood this before, he had clearly learned the lesson by the third or fourth time I steered us to softer ground. Often, I realized after the fact that he had tried to shake the yoke of reticence and share something larger or deeper with me, only for it either to go over my head or send me searching for the likes of weekend plans. “I always knew it was my fault,” he’d responded after I managed to explain where it all went wrong. It must have been seven months before the weight of those seven words finally hit me, the acknowledgment of how much I meant in his life.

I shared my triumphs and anxieties, the minutiae of a life lived, for the first time, quietly at home. In Nao Kao’s life were beer and pizza and weekend hikes, temples, and wedding-upon-wedding. After all, the median age in Laos is under twenty-five; couples are always tying the knot. Pictures and videos of all things Japanese would ping for attention, and not a few articles, either. Whatever, it seemed, that caught his attention, and that in turn he thought might catch mine, zipped from his phone onto mine, one text bubble and buzz at a time.

Nao Kao’s motorcycle, a serious upgrade over the scooter he had left behind when he came to Ann Arbor, was his most prized possession. He loved it far beyond his car, which he drove out of practicality when strictly necessary. He asked me if I had ridden a motorcycle yet – aside from the mopeds when you were in France, he added – and again I was struck dumb by the strength of his memory, the details he had retained from my long-ago stories. “No,” I replied, “not counting those old French mopeds, I have still never so much as sat astride one.”

Once he took his motorcycle – and me – on a virtual tour of the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Luang Prabang, riding north to where the Nam Khan and Mekong Rivers collide, stopping along the way for chicken and rice or to photograph some particularly picturesque vista of mountain or jungle that he thought I would appreciate. In Luang Prabang, he plucked me from his pocket, so to speak, and set his phone to record. In this way, he toured me through the magnificent temple complexes at Wat Xieng Thong, the dramatic peaks outlined in white rising brilliantly against a blue sky, and the red, stacked roofs of Wat Mai whetting my appetite to see the country firsthand.

“Come,” he intoned, at the very end, lest his meaning be lost in the currents between dense and denial.

If I asked him a question that he did not want to answer, he ignored it, a maddening habit I pointed out more than once, along with the fact that it seemed a point of pride for him never to refer to his girls by name. Occasionally, when there was something he wanted from me, some obtuse or existential question about which he wanted my opinion, I would open my archive of unanswered queries and ask again, alongside a comment that the question was not rhetorical – and that my responding to him was contingent upon him extending me the same courtesy. I hoped it was no more obnoxious than it was endearing. As Stacy reminded me, “if he didn’t want to talk to you, he wouldn’t.” We all have our quirks.

One of his older girls was engaged and I teased him, though again harassed might be more accurate, about how soon he would be the father of the bride – and the joys of grandparenting that might not be much further behind.

“I hope they will wait,” he said simply, and whether he meant to marry or to procreate, I did not press. The next time I led the conversation down that path, I was met by a wall of silence.

More places he did not want to delve with me – or maybe even without me. For months I tried to get a straight answer to what I was certain I knew from my internet sleuthing. Happily, or not, I could not say, but I was certain he was still married. Yet try as I might, I could not extract an admission of this simple fact. I remembered his penchant for Shaggy: the possibility that Nao Kao was a total player was never far from my mind.

Occasionally, my level of annoyance would rise enough that I would disappear for a few days. Perhaps his absences followed a similar pattern. Largely what stood out, though, was how natural our conversations felt, how the gap of time – what was, essentially, our entire adult lives – simply fell away, how talking to him now was as comfortable and uninhibited as it had been all those years before as we sat over cartons of tepid takeout and laughed about life.

The silence of the years disappeared at speed. Refraction, that bending of the light that is responsible for rainbows, seemed to me to be at work here, too, knitting our lives into a braided arc, erasing the empty space since we’d last known each other, filling voids with dazzling color.

“How much do you want to know?” I asked when he expressed concern that I was seeing a specialist for the third time.

“I will want to know a lot,” he replied, the verb tenses an acknowledgment of the lateness of the hour; the word choice an acknowledgement, however tacit, that what lies between us, in addition to thousands of miles, is no normal friendship.

Always, always, I was surprised by what he remembered. From the clothes I had worn to the furniture in the living room, it seemed no detail escaped Nao Kao’s attention. Once I began to tell him the story of when I had come face-to-face with a wild boar in Rio. It was trotting down the street as my family headed toward lunch.

“Yes, I remember,” he said, “and then the van you were in got stuck between the building and the café you were going to and when you opened the door, you landed in the laps of the diners.”

“Brazil is also where you met the boy,” he added, before I could even praise the prowess of his memory.

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